The Dog Show December 8-11, 2011 Z Space

*we’d like to thank KUNST-STOFF ARTS for supporting us with a generous space residency. This work was also supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, Dancer’s Group New Stages for dance program, CounterPULSE, THEOFFCENTER, Thetare Bay Area’s CA$H Grant, and Zellerbach Family Foundation

San Francisco, December 2011–The Dog Show is a shared evening of two premiere performance works; Wag by Laura Arrington and Freedom by Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior.

Wag and Freedom are interrogations of domestication, love, and our constantly fluctuating ability to create our own selves. We dig through the catastrophic nature of power, invert the ways that dominant narratives about us have become formed and locked, and work to subvert the muddying fear of our deep and dynamic capabilities as animals/doers/creators/killers. We’re fighting to learn more about our roles, and simultaneously, we’re fighting to get free.

Both works are made possible through funding from the New Stages for Dance pilot award, The Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theater Bay Area’s CA$H Grants, and production support from Z Space, CounterPULSE, TheOffCenter, and Dancers’ group.

About Arrington’s Wag:
The fox has been domesticated; friendlier and with a new coat. The dog knows to wag his tail before we get in the door. Love is a competition on TV, and queers demand the right to fight in the army and get legally married. We make shows for granting institutions and write press releases for folks we don’t know. We all work in systems and systems are always working on us. Wag measures the spaces between obedience and loyalty, exploring how we create structure in society, love, and family. Influenced by the foxes new coat and the feeling of a broken heart, Wag’s process has been one of cultivating discipline and obedience, pushing past duty in an attempt to find something else, to transcend the score, and move beyond the structure.

Laura Arrington directs Atosa Babaoff, Rachael Dichter, Mica Sigourney, and Liz Tenuto in a new performance work with lighting by Darl Andrew Packard.
Wag imagines that the world is ending. It has always been ending. It’s just happening very slowly.

About Hewit’s Freedom:
Freedom investigates the possibility of inverting dominant narratives about media-created “monsters.” It is a visual and sonic reproach to assumptions about who is good and who is evil and why. In Freedom, we embark on the execution of large visceral actions, and reconsider why our responses to such actions come out looking like they do. Are we jealous of the manifestation of impulse? Are we antagonized by sexuality? Are we quite afraid of our own selves and what we are capable of? How do “monster” narratives keep us safe from ourselves, but also securely trapped in a political system fueled by demonization, assumed pathologies, and constant moral panics? How is it that we are and are not free?

Jesse Hewit directs and choreographs in collaboration with performers Melecio Estrella, Evan Johnson, Shawnrey Notto, and Loren Robertson, with lighting by Jerry Lee Abram, sound by Robbie Beahrs, and looks by Dia Vergados.
Freedom is a contemporary confession/act of defiance about how wild and violent and capable we really are.